How Sports Mania Got To First Base

December 03, 1989|By Dave Barry.

Today, in our continuing series on How Guys Think, we explore the question: How come guys care so much about sports?

This is a tough one because caring about sports is, let`s face it, silly. I mean, suppose you have a friend who, for no apparent reason, suddenly becomes obsessed with the Amtrak Corp. He babbles about Amtrak constantly, citing obscure railroad statistics from 1978; he puts Amtrak bumper stickers on his car; and when something bad happens to Amtrak, such as a train crashes and investigators find that the engineer was drinking and wearing a bunny suit, your friend becomes depressed for weeks. You`d think he was crazy, right? ``Bob,`` you`d say to him, as a loving and caring friend, ``you`re a moron. The Amtrak Corp. has NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU.``

But if Bob is behaving exactly the same deranged way about, say, the Pittsburgh Penguins, it`s considered normal guy behavior. He could name his child ``Pittsburgh Penguin Johnson`` and be considered only mildly eccentric. There is something wrong with this. And before you accuse me of being some kind of sherry-sipping, ascot-wearing, ballet-attending MacNeil-Lehrer-Report- watching wussy, please note that I am a sports guy myself, having had a legendary athletic career consisting of nearly a third of the 1965 season on the track team at Pleasantville High School (``Where the Leaders of Tomorrow Are Leaving Wads of Gum on the Auditorium Seats of Today``).

I competed in the long jump because it seemed to be the only event where afterward you didn`t fall down and throw up. I probably would have become an Olympic-caliber long-jumper except that, through one of those ``bad breaks``

so common in sports, I turned out to have the raw leaping ability of a convenience store. I`d race down the runway and attempt to soar into the air, but instead of going up I`d be seized by powerful gravity rays and yanked DOWNWARD and wind up with just my head sticking out of the dirt, serving as a convenient marker for the other jumpers to take off from.

So, okay, I was not Jim Thorpe, but I care as much about sports as the next guy. If you were to put me in the middle of a room, and in one corner was Albert Einstein, in another corner was Abraham Lincoln, in another corner was Plato, in another corner was William Shakespeare, and in another corner (this room is a pentagon) was a TV set showing a football game between teams that have no connection whatsoever with my life, such as the Green Bay Packers and the Indianapolis Colts, I would ignore the greatest minds in Western thought, gravitate toward the TV and become far more concerned about the game than I am about my child`s education. And SO WOULD THE OTHER GUYS. I guarantee it. Within minutes Plato would be pounding Lincoln on the shoulder and shouting in ancient Greek that the receiver did NOT have both feet in bounds.

Obviously, sports connect with something deeply rooted in the male psyche, dating back to prehistoric times, when guys survived by hunting and fighting and they needed many of the skills exhibited by modern athletes-running, throwing, spitting, renegotiating their contracts, adjusting their private parts on nationwide television, etc. So that would explain how come guys like to PARTICIPATE in sports. But how come they care so much about games played by OTHER guys? Does this also date back to prehistoric times? When the hunters were out hurling spears into mastodons, were there also prehistoric guys watching from the hills, drinking prehistoric beer, eating really bad prehistoric hot dogs and shouting, ``We`re No. 1!`` but not understanding what it meant because this was before the development of mathematics?

There must have been because there is no other explanation for such bizarre phenomena as:

-Sports-talk radio, where guys who have never sent get-well cards to their own mothers will express heartfelt, near-suicidal anguish over the hamstring problems of strangers.

-My editor, Gene, who can remember the complete starting lineups for the New York Yankee teams from 1960 through 1964 but who routinely makes telephone calls wherein, after he dials the phone, he forgets who he`s calling, so when somebody answers, Gene has to ask (a) who it is, and (b) does this person happen to know the purpose of the call.

-Another guy in my office, John, who appears to be a normal middle-age husband and father until you realize that he spends most of his waking hours managing a PRETEND BASEBALL TEAM. This is true. He and some other guys have formed a league where they pay actual money to ``draft`` major-league players, and then they have their pretend teams play a whole pretend season, complete with trades, legalistic memorandums and heated disputes over the rules. This is crazy, right?

So I don`t know about the rest of you guys, but I`m thinking it`s time I got some perspective in my life. First thing after the Super Bowl, I`m going to start paying more attention to the things that should matter to me, like my work, my friends and above all my family, especially my little boy, Philadelphia Phillies Barry.